Random Ramsdom: Aaron Donald and the team are underdogs this year, it’s been awhile

Los Angeles Rams News and Links for 9/9/23

Hey happy Saturday! Maybe you are going to watch some College Football or maybe you are going to just hope that Sunday comes faster so we can catch some NFL action.

Either way, the Los Angeles Rams and Aaron Donald are presenting their case as they gear up for their first game against the Seattle Seahawks. Their case being: They don’t care about the doubters, they know what they have internally and they are going to go out there and compete.

What else is the team going to say? They don’t have the pieces and they are in for a long season? I don’t think the PR teams wants the Rams saying that. Do you think it’s smart for LA to use the underdog narrative as fuel? I always love a good underdog (who doesn’t?). I think this season should be fun because of the lesser expectations. We’ll see.

Comment on anything you’d like and have a great day!

Rams Face ‘No Pressure At All’ With Outside Doubters (fannation/ramsdigest)

“Ain’t no pressure at all,” Donald said. “Past couple of years you’ve been praised so high. Now, everybody’s against you kind of thing. You hear it, but me personally, kind of trying to feed off it a little bit because we all need something to try to push us a little bit. It’s different, but I’m for the challenge.”

Los Angeles is now two years removed from winning the Super Bowl, but enters the 2023 season in a full rebuild mode with the youngest roster in the NFL by average age.

Part of the drop-off can be attributed to not having a first-round draft pick since 2016. Another part can be attributed to not keeping a lot of key players from that Super Bowl run, trading cornerback Jalen Ramsey, and failing to re-sign safety Taylor Rapp among others.”

Rams’ Cooper Kupp: IR stint possible, per McVay (cbssports.com)

The timing of the transaction will be key for any timetable for Kupp’s potential return to action. If the Rams make the move Friday or Saturday, he’ll need to be sidelined for at least the first four games of the campaign. Beyond Week 1, the same four-game requirement to return applies. In any case, it appears Kupp is in danger of missing time beyond Sunday’s game at Seattle due to the hamstring injury that has followed him since the start of August and that he aggravated last week. As long as Kupp is out, L.A. will rely on Van Jefferson, Tutu Atwell, Puka Nacua, Ben Skowronek and Demarcus Robinson at wide receiver.

Seahawks’ Pete Carroll discusses Rams matchup, Wagner’s return (sports.mynorthwest.com)

“It’s the culmination of this entire offseason of focus and dreaming, wishing and hoping and hard work to get it right,” Carroll told Seahawks radio voice Steve Raible Friday morning. “It’s a big moment after all of this time we put in to see us for the first time officially. It doesn’t always tell you everything, the first game, but it certainly is much awaited and anticipated and it’s exciting to get our guys revved up and going for the first time as a club. We’ve been talking about it for months now.”

A big focus of Week 1 is on the younger players, and for the Seahawks, they have no shortage there as 24 members of the Seahawks’ 53-man roster are either rookies or seccond-year players.

For the rookies, Carroll shared what the hope is with them in their first regular season game.

“They’ve got to settle in and make sure that we’re playing football instead of thinking about all the rest of the stuff and all the hype and the build up and all that,” Carroll said.”

Rams’ Cooper Kupp gets it: UCLA study shows he wears a performance-enhancing number (latimes.com)

“It happened overnight. NFL wide receivers believed they had just gotten faster, slimmer and swaggier — if such a comparative adjective existed in 2004.

The reason wasn’t new undetectable PEDs.

Call them PENs: Performance-enhancing numbers.

No longer were wideouts restricted to wearing jersey numbers from 80 to 89; numbers from 10 to 19 were permissible as well. Look good, feel good, play good. That’s the mantra for wide receivers, a group long known for their vainglory.

Receivers had long held that numbers beginning with a 8 made them appear fat, giving new meaning to the term wideout. Besides, anything to do with the 80s was old school. Teens are perpetually cool.

And now there’s proof, or at least an academic study — from UCLA, no less — that validates what wide receivers have said all along. The findings were published Thursday in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed open access mega journal published by the Public Library of Science since 2006.”

Very interesting, does the jersey number have any impact on injuries?